Can’t We Build It Ourselves? And the Time Value of Money

One of the most common questions we get from our vendor prospects is, “Why should we use your platform when we can build it ourselves?” They are right, they may be able to build a basic point integration themselves, but why should they?

When I was younger I was proud to be able to change the oil in my first car. These days I have higher priorities on my list. Why change the oil myself when I can pay someone to do it better and faster? The time value of money matters. That hour of time I get back by paying someone to do this worth the cost.
Today, many enterprise content management (ECM) and document management system (DMS) platforms and tools have point integrations to ECM and DMS platforms. For example, it’s common for every ECM vendor to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint and many are starting to support Box. That requires at least two people to support the development and maintenance of those integrations. That’s two people that are not focused on your core product. Is that the most valuable use of their time? No. Their time would be better spent developing your core solution.

You will need a well architected solution to handle these in a high performance and easy to manage way. To do this, you’ll need an entire team of developers. Your organization can easily find itself spending $250,000 or more in just supporting integrations. Is that a good time value of money? No. We have a team of developers that have built just that. Let your developers develop your product, let ours build integrations.

Coding is only Half of the Equation
While your development team is focused on building your integration, your sales and marketing team is busy selling the integration. You may have found success in selling your first integration but that doesn’t always translate into how you sell the next one. Are your sales teams motivated the same way? Are the platforms viewed the same way? What obstacles lie ahead? Your development efforts could become a lost investment if you can’t make the sales cycle work. Using our platform to develop your integrations allow your sales team to have access to our entire list of platforms when asked if they support Vendor “B”.

Sure you could have your development team build integrations but doesn’t your development team have more important things to focus on? The Simflofy team’s main focus is content integrations. Simflofy can do it better, faster and at an overall lower cost than you can do it yourself. This is a much better use of your money.